Continuing my new trend of regurgitating badass science finds across the net, I bring you the following article from Wired. An excerpt:

The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, “similar to a serial number on a handgun.” And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch:

“Develop strategies to create a synthetic organism “self-destruct” option to be implemented upon nefarious removal of organism.”

The project comes as Darpa also plans to throw $20 million into a new synthetic biology program, and $7.5 million into “increasing by several decades the speed with which we sequence, analyze and functionally edit cellular genomes.”

Head on over to Wired to read the full article, it’s pretty awesome. It’s sound like fascinating work, but also dangerous. The ethical debates that come out of it are likely to be intense, since it invokes the whole “playing god” issue. As an atheist, that’s not really a concern to me.

Whether or not we should create life is not even a question. If we can, we should. The question is what kind of life should it be, what will be its purpose, and are we doing it for the right reason? Considering DARPA is heading up the project, philanthropy is probably not on their priority list here.

I’m not saying nothing good comes out of the military, because that’s just not true. Much of what they do has made the world better, and a lot of it is simply out of necessity. All I’m sayin’ is that it’s pretty unlikely they’re developing ageless organisms purely for science, medicine and the betterment of mankind. It might trickle down that way like all technologies do (including one we’re particularly familiar with) but the initial project? Unlikely.

It’s also worth noting that we’re not looking at a lot of money here, in science terms. This is a bare few millions, which is definitely not enough money to go off breeding a super race or anything. We’re most likely looking at basic tissues or micro organisms.

Regardless, it’s something that is both fascinating and frightening. The fact that we, in the near future, may have the ability to design and create life that is essentially ageless is an intimidating thought.

[Source]